Shares in Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company, Tesla, rose nearly 7% in trading before the bell in the US today, after Bloomberg News reported that president-elect Donald Trump’s transition team was planning to set up federal regulations for autonomous vehicles.
The report comes days after Trump named Musk, the automaker’s CEO, as a co-head of the incoming administration’s new government efficiency department, Reuters reports.
Last month, Musk criticized the state-by-state approval process, required for self-driving vehicles, as “incredibly painful”, weeks after unveiling a two-seat “Cybercab” robotaxi without a steering wheel and foot pedals, set to go into production in 2026.
Trump’s team is looking for policy leaders for the transport department to develop a federal regulatory framework, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter.
A unified federal regulation could streamline this (approval process), allowing Tesla to push forward more rapidly with FSD [full self driving] testing,” said Mamta Valechha, analyst at Quilter Cheviot.
However, the regulation is not the primary barrier holding Tesla back at the moment, it’s the company’s FSD driver assistance technology that is still not fully autonomous and requires driver supervision.
Actually that’s not entirely daft - Having one set of rules for autonomous vehicles instead of 50 sets is going to make life easier for all manufacturers
Autonomous cars are coming - that is a fact. The only question is when. It would make a change for a govt to regulate a new industry before it got out of control for once
“It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things; for the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order; this lukewarmness arising partly from the incredulity of mankind who does not truly believe in anything new until they actually have experience of it.”